Pilot mismanagement blamed for Asiana plane crash in US
Print Edition
PILOT mismanagement and confusion caused Asiana Flight 214 to crash in San Francisco last year, US accident investigators concluded yesterday.
The National Transportation Safety Board said there was confusion over whether one of the airliner’s key controls was maintaining speed.
The agency also cited the complexity of the Boeing 777’s autothrottle and pilot training by the South Korea-based airline as contributing to the crash, which killed three passengers and injured more than 200.
The three people killed were Chinese teens, who were seated in the back and were thrown from the plane. One of the teenage girls survived the crash but was run over by two rescue vehicles in the chaos that ensued.
The plane, with 307 people on board, was too low and too slow during the landing attempt. Its tail struck a seawall and was ripped off. The rest of plane went spinning and sliding down the runway.
Before the vote, Chris Hart, the NTSB’s acting chairman, said that increasingly complex automated aircraft controls designed to improve safety are instead creating new opportunities for error. The Asiana flight crew “over-relied on automated systems that they did not fully understand”, he said.
Among the other issues raised by the probe are some that long have concerned aviation officials, including hesitancy by some pilots to abort a landing when things go awry or to challenge a captain’s actions.
The irony of the accident is that it occurred at all. Three experienced pilots were in the cockpit on July 6, 2013. The jet, a Boeing 777, had one of the industry’s best safety records. And weather conditions that sunny day were near perfect.
In documents made public by the safety board, Asiana acknowledged the likely cause of the accident was the crew’s failure to monitor and maintain the plane’s airspeed, and its failure to abort the landing when in trouble. It said the pilot and co-pilot reasonably believed the automatic throttle would keep the plane flying fast enough to land safely, when in fact the auto throttle was effectively shut off after the pilot idled it to correct an unexplained climb earlier.
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